Stay private and protected with the best Firefox security extensions

Keep watch over your security and privacy with the Firefox add-ons designed to guard your data.

With Mozilla's focus on Firefox privacy and keeping user data secure, you'd expect to find lots of security extensions for the Firefox Web browser. Privacy and security extensions for Firefox range from ones that can block trackers to those that can throttle how much of your data Facebook can track.

What are Firefox browser add-ons?

With both the desktop and mobile versions of Firefox, you can download and add extensions and themes to customize the browser to match your needs and style. You can add themes and add-ons to monitor your privacy, change the look of the browser, track deals on shopping sites, keep to-do lists, and download files, for example. Add-ons appear in the toolbar, to the right of the address bar. You can also move them into the overflow menu, to the right of the toolbar. You can use the Firefox add-ons manager to set preferences or disable or remove a Firefox extension. Many of the Firefox security add-ons are available for both the desktop version of Firefox as well as the Android version. And you can find versions for Google's Chrome browser as well.

Can Firefox's built-in tools help keep you secure?

Firefox, out of the box, comes with a handy collection of security tools. Through settings, you can have Firefox block trackers, manage cookies, and wipe private data and browsing history when you quit the browser. You can use Private Browsing to prevent Firefox from saving information about sites and pages you've visited. And you can enable Tracking Protection to identify and block trackers across sites. If you want to go further, however, the best Firefox privacy add-ons can give you greater control over trackers and direct you to the encrypted versions of websites.

Can Firefox handle basic password management?

Firefox offers a simple password manager that can save the usernames and passwords you use for websites and other online services. To take an extra security step, you can set a master password to unlock Firefox's password manager before it fills in your personal data. If you want to manage passwords and other log-in information across multiple devices and services, however, a Firefox password-manager extension would be up to the task.

From Mozilla, the Facebook Container add-on for Firefox lets you keep your Web activity separate from your Facebook activity and prevent the social service from tracking your non-Facebook browsing.

The Facebook Container extension opens the Facebook page in a separate blue-colored container tab that is designed to fence everything else you've been doing with Firefox from Facebook by preventing Facebook from tracking you outside of the Facebook website via third-party cookies.

Privacy Badger from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, watches for third-party trackers that monitor your browsing across websites and blocks their ability to track your activity without your permission. Privacy Badger works much like the uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus add-ons for Firefox but is intended to be simpler to use with your browser.

The Privacy Possum add-on obstructs the tracking methods used by tracking companies to collect data from your browsing activities. The add-on achieves this through a variety of means that make it much harder for trackers to create a unique fingerprint for your browser.

Another helpful extension from the EFF, HTTPS Everywhere works to encrypt your Web communications by automatically redirecting your traffic to the HTTPS version of a website if the encrypted version is available.

The Decentraleyes browser add-on offers a local collection of commonly used Web libraries that keeps a website from requesting those libraries from an external server, using its local ones instead. It's a bit confusing, but check out these Reddit posts for more on how the extension guards your privacy.

Like Privacy Badger, Disconnect identifies and blocks trackers. In fact, Firefox uses for its own privacy settings a list provided by Disconnect to identify and block trackers. The extension is easy to set up and monitor.

The LastPass password manager lets you generate, save, and fill in passwords in the Firefox browser for free. With a $2 monthly subscription, you can share passwords with family members and use multifactor authentication.

Bitwarden is a free, open-source password manager that lets you create, store, and sync passwords across popular browsers and mobile and desktop platforms. If you already use another password manager, you can import your data from LastPass, 1Password, and Chrome, for example.

Clifford is an Associate Managing Editor for CNET's Download.com. He spent a handful of years at Peachpit Press, editing books on everything from the first iPhone to Python. He also worked at a handful of now-dead computer magazines, including MacWEEK and MacUser. Unrelated, he sits next to fellow editor Josh Rotter and roots for the A's.